1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic mail apparatus.
2. Prior Art
In recent years, electronic mails rapidly spread in a world-wide scale. In addition, in accordance with global development of enterprises, the importance of electronic mails increases. Persons having friends residing in foreign countries increase in number, and persons having different mother tongues are frequently in correspondence with each other with electronic mails.
An electronic mail can be transmitted to anyone in the world in an environment which can be connected to a network. For this reason, if the difficulties of communication caused by differences between languages can be canceled, it is supposed that the electronic mails can be fixed as convenient tools which can be easily used by anyone.
However, Japanese is expressed by hiragana, katakana, and kanji. For this reason, the number of types of characters to be expressed is several thousands to several tens of thousands. For this reason, in Japan, a 2-byte character code is used to express one character.
In contrast to this, English is expressed by only roman letters (alphabets). The number of types of alphabets is fifty-two. For this reason, in a country (e.g., in the U.S.A.) using English as its mother tongue, a 1-byte character code (8-byte code) is used to express one character (e.g., the ASCII code).
In contrast to this, German is expressed by roman letters and characters obtained by adding umlauts to the roman letters. For this reason, the number of types of used characters is larger than English. Therefore, in Germany, in order to express one character, a 1.5-byte character code is used.
As described above, since the types of used characters are different in number depending on languages. For this reason, in the world, the byte counts of several types of character codes are used.
A character display device (e.g., a personal computer, a work station, a mobile computer, a mobile telephone set, or the like) for text-displaying characters by using character codes handles character codes (text data) which can express the language of a country in which the device is used.
However, since character codes which are handled by the character display device are different from each other, the following problem occurs. In general, character codes which can be handled by the character display device are limited to character codes which can text-display the language of a country in which the device is used.
For this reason, the character display device cannot text-display characters by using character codes except for the character codes which can be handled by the device. For this reason, since a character display device used in the U.S.A. can handle only 1-byte character codes, the character display device cannot handle 1.5-byte and 2-byte character codes. More specifically, Japanese and German cannot be text-displayed.
In addition, some character codes having equal byte counts have difference character codes which can be handled (Japanese, Korean, and the like). In such a case, the same problem as described above occurs.
Therefore, for example, it is assumed that a Japanese people forms an electronic mail in Japanese to transmit the electronic mail to her/his friend residing in the U.S.A. In this case, when a character display device used by the friend can receive only 1-byte character codes, the character display device cannot text-display the contents of the electronic mail.
In this manner, character codes (text data) corresponding to the contents of the electronic mail can be transmitted and received in the world. However, when the character codes cannot be handled on the reception side, the contents of the electronic mail cannot be text-displayed on the reception side.